Celebrating 10 Years of the Visual Artist Fellowship

Dhara Mehrotra

Mittal Institute: Were there any specific experiences, people, or opportunities during the fellowship that had a lasting impact on you?

There were many experiences during my time at VAF that I deeply cherish, along with the incredible people I had the privilege to meet. Connecting with the metaLAB group was especially meaningful—it opened up a platform to explore art practices rooted in scientific inquiry and data visualization. It was also a great honor to meet renowned scholars such as Prof. László Barabási, Prof. Jeffrey Schnapp, Prof. Jinah Kim, Prof. Homi Bhabha, the late Dr. Richard Cash, and many other distinguished academics.

Archives at the Harvard Library and special in-person viewing of ancient manuscripts & artefacts up close at the Harvard Art Museums were unforgettable highlights of my time at Cambridge. One of the most inspiring outcomes was my association with the PLS Lab at MIT, a connection initiated during the fellowship that has since evolved into an ongoing collaborative project beyond the duration I was there in 2023.

Mittal Institute: How has your work evolved since your fellowship at Harvard? What are you currently working on or excited about in your practice?

Since my fellowship at Harvard, I believe my practice has expanded in both scale and depth, evolving through a more intuitive engagement with materials. I continue to weave narratives around clusters and networks, memory and meaning, ecology and interconnected systems, reflecting on ways we experience life.

Recent highlight has been, a site-responsive wall installation ‘Filamentous’, for the British Textile Biennial 2025 at Whitaker Museum, Lancashire, UK. I am equally excited about the possibilities that continue to evolve from the ideas nurtured during this installation.

Mittal Institute: Whose work is inspiring you right now, and why?

The groundbreaking work by a group of mycologists at SPUN (Amsterdam) has been very inspiring lately. Their initiative to map the underground nets of biodiversity across the planet has been of great interest.

Mittal Institute: Share one image that captures something meaningful about your practice today. This could be a recent artwork, a studio moment, or you at work.

To me, the image is a reminder of the immersive process of making—an intimate journey of hands-on creation and realization. It reflects the quiet labor of love, the hours spent over days on site or in the studio, devoted to a single evolving task. Each moment contributes to a form that slowly unfolds. No matter how carefully visualized beforehand, the final artwork always asserts its own presence. There is something unique and unforeseen yet deeply connected to the act of making itself, as if it breathes with a life and claims a mind of its own.

Explore more of the artist’s work here.